


Change, Exchange, Change

by NervousAsexual



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Canon, friends., friends?, many years post-canon actually, totes heterosexual you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 16:40:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8453875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: Emily Kaldwin is unseated as empress, and she and her armies retreat to the water. They are few, but if there is a chance to reclaim her throne they will find it on the river.
After a skirmish the empress' enemies suggest a trade. A hundred prisoners in exchange for the life of one royal protector. Her choice, of course.
To some the water is life. To others...





	1. Chapter 1

He slept on and off, but safely. The Paradisio was small, barely visible from larger ships, and the crew would never have let him come to any harm. Still he could feel the water in his lungs.

They landed in a cove not far from the make-shift field hospital.  _She_ was waiting for them, and whispered in Emily's ear.

Emily let her speak and returned to the bunks. The crew was hissing, yelling, pleading at her when he awoke.

"What is it?" he asked. They fell silent.

She sat on the edge of his bed. "Corvo, they took the hospital."

They... took... hospital... all such generic words they could have meant anything. Slowly, slowly, the concept took shape.

"Casualties?" he asked, voice rough in his throat.

"Mostly able-bodied soldiers. No deaths among physicians or the wounded so far as we know."

He coughed to clear the growing phlegm.

"But then, we know what they do to prisoners."

"What..." Another deep raspy cough slammed through his body. "What can we give them for the prisoners?"

She was silent, and the room around her was as well.

"What do they want?"

She looked away. "They want you."

"All right. Contact them." The fever raced through his skull. "Tell them to expect the exchange."

"No! Corvo, no. We need you."

"There's nothing else I can do in this condition. You are their leader. You have been for a while. I need to protect them while I can."

"There's nothing to stop them from killing you at an exchange and then slaughtering the prisoners. Or worse, torturing you for information. You can't guarantee... There are just too many ways it could go wrong."

With all the strength he had he laid his hand upon hers.

"He is good at not talking," Samuel admitted.

"No! I will  **not** allow this." She yanked her hand away. "I will not." She stood and left. One by one the others followed. All but one. All but Samuel.

Samuel rubbed at his face.

"You know... I have to, Samuel."

He inclined his head. "I expect her Ladyship knows that too, Corvo."

He needed to sleep. He needed comfort. He needed her understanding.

Samuel sat down beside him. "Corvo..." He put a hand against Corvo's, laid the other against his shoulder, and he lay down beside him.

Corvo slipped under again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just like old times.

They came in the Amaranth under the cover of night, as they used to long ago, just the two of them. They barely spoke.

"All right, Corvo?" Samuel whispered once.

He nodded. The heavy blankets crushed the energy he once had for speaking.

He did not sleep, exactly. He lay against the tail of the boat, looking up at the stars. Resting.

All too soon the boat bumped against the bank. He was not ready, to stand, to walk. He wanted sleep so badly.

"Take your time," Samuel said.

There was no time. The sun would rise, would give away their position. Unhappily he stripped back the blankets. Samuel helped him from the boat and onto the the sinking mud. She would never forgive him. Never.

An arm around his waist. His own across Samuel's shoulder.

He let his head sink down on Samuel's shoulder. They staggered through the mud. He panted for breath. Cold. So cold.

Then Samuel shouting, "Don't shoot!" Rush of blood in his head. "Let go of the prisoners. He's here."

Voices. Samuel's hand tightens around his hip.

"You promised," Samuel shouts. "Remember!"

Then Samuel is gone. Corvo is on his knees on rough cobblestones. They wrap rope around and around his wrists, tie it, wrap again, up his forearms, tie again at the elbows. Wrap between his arms. Tie again. They drag him.

Jessamine. She will never forgive him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in the field hospital: a brief aside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> technically this was the first scene I wrote, before this was even a Dishonored fic. This character doesn't actually have a name, but yes she and Hannah are married. Fight me, canonical gender politics.

She cried first from pain. They took her arm, an eye, her family, and locked her away. They gave her things for the pain. She stopped crying.

She cried again when the guns came again. The smell of the battlefield around her. She had never expected it to find her here.

She cried and cried and the others cried as well. There was nothing for the pain. The young man in the next bed cried a little less each day until they wrapped him in a bedsheet and took him away.

She cried when the guns left. When the news came. They were safe. She would not believe that.

She cried when she heard about David. He'd given his life to save his own children. They'd found him bracing over them, taking the weight of the debris onto himself. Poor David. Brave David. Heroic David.

And she cried when Hannah brought the children and little Renard was not with them. In their neighbor's home only David, the admiral, had died. In theirs, the son was gone. Just a child, while she, a decorated veteran, lived.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo dreams.

Emily was right. They tortured him.

The burn of the iron poker against his side. The deep cuts, deeper bruises. All he could do to keep breathing. Fever washed over him again and again and again.

In. Out. Come on. Keep breathing. No matter how hard it gets. He heard Jessamine's voice reminding him.

He was dying.

I know, the other voices whispered. I know that you know. I can break you just like that.

But he didn't speak. At some points he couldn't speak.

He dreamed of the ocean, of being pulled down, of burning lungs. Of the silence and someone yanking his head down. He can only imagine, after he wakes, the arms that wrapped around him, shoved away the hands holding him down, pulled him to the surface.

Again he drifts in and out, this time in tears. Dehydration pulls him down and there is no one to push it away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it's not really clear, Corvo was nearly drowned before the events of the story--that's how he ended up with pneumonia.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the exchange.

They kept their word and fell back from the field hospital. Emily's soldiers saw them go, moved in slowly, cautiously. Every guard had been executed, along with a handful of physicians and nurses. Three of the wounded had succumbed to their injuries.

They had roughed up Samuel only a little, but he spent the night on the river, half out of fear that they would follow him home and half of despair at telling Emily.

When he did return to the Paradisio Emily had him flogged, then, when no one saw, went to him at night and hugged him.

"He knew what he were doing." He ached and the marks of the whip burned against him.

"I am his regent," Emily said softly. "I told him not to."

"No. To him you're still the little princess."

He let the darkness cloud in and dozed.

When he awoke again one of Emily's ladies brought him a steaming mug of tea.

"Her Ladyship's favorite recipe," the maid told him. "She sends her apologies but we must present a united front for the soldiers."


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The empress tends to her subjects, and Samuel worries.

At nightfall Emily visited the wounded who had been held as prisoners. She held hands, cried with those who had lost family, changed the bandages of a woman who had lost her baby son, and held the hand of the fourth and final prisoner to die. Samuel, as they rinsed the wounds on his back, heard Emily's  ladies tell each other how good her visit had been for morale.

"Especially after what happened to Corvo, huh?" he grunted, but they said nothing.

When the initial exhaustion wore off it was difficult to sleep. Not now. Not after he realized what they would do to Corvo.

Breathe for me, he whispered to the night air, and prayed to the Outsider he had done the right thing.


	7. Chapter 7

It was the pneumonia that nearly killed him. It got to the point he was coughing blood and barely semiconscious, and, reluctantly, they stepped back.

He saw Jessamine. Emily. Barely made out Callista, Cecilia, his own mother. Samuel kneeling over him and offering a hand.

Superstitious whispers suggested the plague. The coughing tore his stomach inside out and he vomited blood as well.

When they wrapped him in a shroud he thought they were going to torture him again. But as they threw him into the sewers he remembered.

As he lay in the darkness he listened for Jessamine's voice.

It was long, long gone.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The return.

An orphaned child was the one to find him, picking through the sewers for lost coin. Emily paid the child a small fortune in exchange for being lead to the body, and offered her a bunk on the Paradisio as well. The child accepted, and Samuel, resting on the deck where the sun broke through, saw them coming.

He was working the Paradisio again, but his broken ribs and nausea from the concussion slowed him down. He would sit on the deck, sometimes dozing when the sun grew warmer. But he was conscious when a small squadron of soldiers appeared, towing a makeshift litter behind them.

He got himself upright and saw the blood staining the underside of the litter, the small child running alongside, and Emily emerging from her quarters. They carried the litter toward the hospital and Samuel stood to get a better look.

He instantly recognized the swollen, mottled face and stumbled onto the bank, but a sailor grabbed him by the arms and held him back.

Only Emily went to them and bent low over the litter. She spoke quietly to the soldiers. They carried him off and Samuel could only stand, frozen.

He went directly to Emily that night to plead his case, but she shot it down.

"It's better this way," she told him. "If we let him be his chances improve. Even I won't see him."

He needed to know. To see. To comfort Corvo. Instead he returned to his own bunk, pulled the blankets around him, and waited.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She tried.

It was too much. He surfaced alone in the quarantine room of the hospital. He absolutely could not continue this way. He begged for Jessamine, for Emily. They fed him a few swallows of soup, helped him sip some water, and left him.

He did not remember making a deal for the hospital. He thought they were mocking him.

 

Eventually his crying began to disrupt the other patients, and one night they fetched Emily to his side. She told him of the deal, of the lives he had saved. She did not mention Samuel, who had returned to running covert operations by night.

"Jessamine," he called her, and she put her head on his chest and tried not to cry.

The fabric of time was worn thin in places around him. He was everywhere and no where, simultaneously being tortured--his wrists bound horribly before him, still recovering from the near drowning, and standing at Jessamine's side.

Once or twice he asked for Samuel, wanted to know when they were leaving for Kingsparrow Island.

By this time supplies of whale oil were running critically low and Samuel had taken up the dangerous task of smuggling the glowing containers down the river. They were easy targets. Explosive targets.

Emily had not suggested this job for him, but neither had she expressed worry over the danger. She did not answer Corvo.

He asked again and again for Jessamine, but Emily dreaded reliving the empress' death with him. What more was there to say?

They sedated Corvo. Tucked him away while she was drawing up battle plans and commanding her forces. When he awoke he would blearily ask, again, for her mother.

Gradually it dawned on her that there was, just maybe, another way.

So, one night, when she heard the Amaranth dock alongside the Paradisio, she sent for Samuel.

He came to her red in the face, out of breath--his ribs were not quite healed.

"Yer ladyship," he said, bobbing his head.

She'd prepared for anger--his or hers, it did not matter which. He would be angry at his punishment, at being kept at arm's length. Her anger would flare when she remembered how he had contributed to Corvo's condition. But as he leaned back against the door frame, struggling for air with one hand pressed against his ribs and the other clinging to his shoulder, she felt the tears coming.

He listened as she told him about how restless Corvo was, how hurt.

"I can't," she said, struggling to hold down the sobs. "I've tried to make him understand but he doesn't."

Samuel wiped away his sweat with the back of a hand.

"He needs to hear it from some one familiar, some one he trusts. And like you said. To him I'm still a little girl."

"Take me there," he said softly.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Corvo.

He awoke to see someone on a cot beside him, someone who was snoring softly, and felt strangely safe.

Breathing was more difficult while he was conscious and he panted and groaned and then a deep gravely voice asked, "Corvo?"

Samuel. He felt weak with relief. "You're here."

"Hadn't left."

He could almost make out the shades of Samuel's face in the dark. "When are we going... to Kingsparrow?"

"We aren't."

"But... Emily..."

"Right here." Samuel jerked his head toward the door. "She's been down here with you every day."

"No. Jessamine."

"Gone. Ten years gone, Corvo."

No. That wasn't possible. She'd been at his side when Emily was taken... when the world stopped turning... when... when the assassin had run her through.

"I can ask them for Emily. I reckon she'd come. But she has been here. They took you this time."

It had to be a mistake, he was sure of it, and yet he remembered. The hospital. The deal. The boat at midnight. Samuel gasping as they beat him. His own feeble struggle to stay conscious.

The smell of his own flesh burning.

Drowning.

"No."

Samuel coughed, groaned, curled around himself.

"Jessamine."

"I'm sorry."

"Have to protect her. Have to stop..." He struggled to sit up but pain erupted against his side, down his entire body, and he fell back.

"Gotta take care of yourself now, Corvo."

Too late, his mind taunted. Too late, too late... And as Samuel again laid a hand on his arm he wept.


End file.
